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I haven't found a specific answer to my question so please excuse me when an answer is somewhere out there. Regarding the '1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE' address. If it would take more than the universe's time to crack such address how did this address get found and by whoem in the first place? Not any and all combinations of characters is a legit address or am i wrong? Really confused about this, hope someone can clear this out for me! And are there more longer known messages in exsisting addresses? Love to know about them!

Source: https://miro.medium.com/max/700/0*cg3mwxEbN7vIKbDS.jpg

Edit: What I refer to is a burn (lost key) address instead of vanity (owned key)

Thanks in advance

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Funds are spendable by public keys and addresses contain public key hashes. Vanity addresses are created by hashing lots of public keys until the hash is in an expected range. What you mentioned is an example of a burn address, not a vanity address. Burn addresses are crafted by manually editing the public key hash with a specific the corresponding address in mind. Burn addresses do have corresponding public key(s), but since we it is impossible to find the public key from the public key hash, burn addresses cannot spend their funds. They are similar to addresses whose owners mistakenly deleted their wallets, where the funds are in a locked state.

The last digits of burn addresses is random is because addresses also contain a checksum which is the hash of everything else encoded in the address.

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  • Thanks! That explains a lot, so if I'm getting this correctly it's just way easier (due to increased chances) to bruteforce for an exsisting (burn) address without ever knowing the private or public key than you were to bruteforce those keys? Which makes sense!
    – MDev
    Commented May 9, 2021 at 10:40
  • Sorry, I didn't make it clear in my answer. Burn addresses are not made by bruteforcing. A Base58 address is written arbitrarily with final digits as placeholder digits (to be filled with the checksum later), then converted to a byte array (network byte + public key hash + checksum) and the checksum is calculated from the network byte + public key hash and then the whole address is re-encoded as Base58. There is no brute forcing in burn address creation.
    – MCCCS
    Commented May 9, 2021 at 10:52
  • Also, there is one character near the end of the address whose value is affected by both the checksum and the public key hash. If that character is aimed to be set as well, then bruteforcing a small range might be needed.
    – MCCCS
    Commented May 9, 2021 at 10:58

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